entropy why is it that u still haven't answered urtalkinstupid's first question? u know... it's the one about mercury's orbit? do you even know what it looks like or why it is truly unique? if so please give me a more indepth explanation... and yes i saw ur measly excuse for an answer and i could've gotten that out of an encyclopedia.
I admitted that I didn't not know about the irregularity of Mercury's orbit. I've tried to search for some references to it without success. But thank you for that link I'm reading it right now and my answer is the same.
The author claims that the problem is that Mercury has an elliptical orbit without a a gravitational source at one of it's foci. The thing is that you don't need to have an actual object there, simply a gravitation field, like from a distant object like another planet.
Another problem the author says:
But Mercury has a very eccentric orbit and it is millions of miles closer at perihelion than it is at aphelion, its farthest distance from the Sun. So it really has to move FAST there to stay in orbit. When Mercury is that close, the sun's gravity is even stronger. In Einstein's words, the curvature of space-time is greater here so Mercury "feels" like there is an extra mass here. That extra mass feels like it is trying to pull the planet inward. By giving Mercury this pull every three months, the orbit is kicked a bit, making it rotate very slowly in space. Remember our marble in the well? Suppose we give it a slight pull inwards every time it gets a little deeper in the well but not enough to pull it all the way in. The marble comes back out but not quite on the path it would have taken if we hadn't interfered. That's what the sun's gravity is doing. Newton's gravity is much simpler than Einstein's gravity but Einstein's cleared up the mystery of the orbit turning the wrong amount!
This is where he makes a mistake. As Mercury comes closer to the sun (i.e. gravity is stronger on it) it
is falling into the sun a little so to speak but something else occurs with this. It speeds up as it falls therefore being "sling shotted" around the sun. The momentum it gained as it sped up allows it to continue on its predicted orbital path. This
has been observed with just about all celestial bodies. Most commonly comets because they have very eccentric orbits.
terrabyte, when the world was viewed as flat, it was something that no one could argue against. Even through observations the world seemed flat, but that thought doesn't run through our mind today, because we know that the world is sphere like.
Acutally most cultures through out time didn't believe the world was flat at all. Very few ancient peoples believed in a flat Earth.
Missing mass in the universe? The universe expanding by a mysterious "repulsive" force? Galaxies moving away from each other?
What missing mass? Not all physicists believe that there needs to be dark matter in order to make up for missing mass. Many thought there needed to be missing mass because stars at the ends of galaxies moved just as fast as ones in the center. But many now theorize that stars at the ends of galaxies only appear to be moving faster at the moment because of certain types of waves moving though the galaxies.
The universe expanding by a mysterious "repulsive" force?
You mean momentum from the Big Bang? And it has been brought into question whether the universe is actually explanding (see below).
Galaxies moving away from each other?
Actually that too has been brought into question because gravity can red-shift light and make objects appear as if they are moving away at high speeds. Along with other sources of red-shift it is very possible that red-shift my not be a good tool for measuring objects' speeds.
